Flint Mayor Labels Opponents as Racists

In the upcoming recall election, November 2017, Flint’s current Mayor, Karen Weaver has labeled two of her challengers, Mr. Scott Kincaid and Mr. Arthur Woodson, as being “a racist and a sellout.” During an interview on Detroit, MI radio station AM 910 with host Steve Hood, Mayor Weaver stated “Mr. Kincaid’s plan has been all along to control those five votes on city council, get somebody to sell out because they got a black person- [Mr. Woodson]- to sell out and do the recall, and then it was all for him-[Mr. Kincaid]- so it’s always been his own agenda.”

The Mayor offered her comments in agreement with another guest on the program, Sam Riddle, who referred to Mr. Woodson as a “punk” who was involved in another incident along with Mr. Riddle some years back. Mr. Riddle also refers to Mr. Kincaid as representing a certain “redneck element in Flint”, not unlike those involved in the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the entire exchange, Mrs. Weaver does not reject any of the charges by Mr. Riddle as being out of line, but does in fact affirm his remarks.

This is not the first time Mayor Weaver has injected race into a situation during her time in office. The first was on an interview on ABC’s daytime television show, The View. The interview was conducted in January 2015, shortly after she had taken office as Flint’s Mayor. Her campaign was centered on correcting the mistakes made which caused the water crisis in Flint, which was indeed a significant tragedy and considerable challenge to the citizens and officials charged to correct the errors. After a question by one of the show hosts if the water crisis was due to “environmental racism” being due to Flint’s racial make of African-American citizens, Mayor Weaver answered, “…we believe had this been a different community – a rich community – it wouldn’t have taken this long for people’s voices to be heard.” The Mayor went on to say that the water crisis happened “under the emergency manager, and emergency managers seem to happen in predominately African-American communities.”

At no time since 2014 when the water crisis began, has any proof been shown that race had any role in what happened to the city’s water system. What is known to be the actual root cause is incompetence and malfeasance by elected and bureaucratic officials at all levels of government.

In both situations, the recall and the water situation, one would think that a Mayor who campaigned to be the champion of all the citizens would not inflame the situation with caustic rhetoric and unfounded accusations for political purposes, unless those commentaries are her true beliefs.